The Singles Jukebox

You’re doing mid, Oklahoma…

[Video]
[5.62]

Ian Mathers: This goes so much harder than anything from Twisters: The Album ought to that it verges on false advertising.
[8]

Julian Axelrod: There are two songs on the Twisters soundtrack with “Oklahoma” in the title. Lainey Wilson’s “Out of Oklahoma” is a tender, conflicted ballad that underlines both our heroine Kate’s complicated feelings toward her hometown and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s complicated feelings toward American accents. On the other end of the spectrum is Luke Combs’s “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” a big honking stomper that blares out of YouTube storm chaser Tyler’s truck every time he drives into frame. “Out of Oklahoma” is a much better song, but “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma” feels truer to the movie around it: unapologetically dumb, unfathomably huge, and completely uninterested in weather science. In a way, Luke Combs is the Glen Powell of the Twisters soundtrack: He feels it, he rides it, he secures the bag.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: You know what they say about the weather in Oklahoma (and every other state with a version of this adage): if you don’t like how badass a song about it sounds, wait two minutes.
[4]

Tim de Reuse: My bona fides: I grew up in tornado alley, a stone’s throw from the same Red River that Combs is caterwauling about here, and I spent every spring and summer hiding in basements and bathrooms with a battery-powered radio whenever the sirens turned on. If you’re going to write an aggressive, regionally-themed country belter, then the theme of middle-American inclement weather gives you a lot to work with! A skinny little fuck-you from heaven that selectively plucks entire neighborhoods off the map, terrifying in its unpredictability but boring in its yearly ritualization — you could say a lot there about vice, adrenaline, self-destruction, or maybe just the texture of life in Oklahoma itself. But outside of a few lines that explicitly reference storm-chasing, ostensibly added out of contractual obligation, it’s Combs-by-numbers, albeit with a soundtrack-ass hard-rock production job that bounces off his voice completely. If someone else had gotten this paycheck they might have accidentally done something interesting.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Not bad, just not good. Doesn’t tell me anything about who you are, or what you feel.
[6]

Alfred Soto: I want my tornado songs to sound like sax solos on Stooges tracks or to depict romantic entanglement like this forgotten 1996 beauty. Luke Combs doesn’t sound like a windstorm — he blows hot air like a MAGA on a street corner.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: There were probably discussions at some point about wanting to learn from the mistakes of “Humans Being,” which is unfortunate because “Humans Being” is Van Hagar at their messy, pissed-off best, mixing chaos and composure in a way that perfectly mirrors the characters on screen. Combs’s paean to the perils of storm chasing is more deliberate in its pacing and more literal in its writing, while still leaving enough lyrical wiggle room for those who really do just want the tornadoes to be metaphors. The focus on duality and ambivalence is appropriate for a disaster film in which the disaster is both sought out and avoided in equal measure. And if the tough-talking country-rock grit scans as generic upon first listen, those few seconds of breathing room after each verse offer both variety and a hint of the “silent extreme” that Hagar spoke of.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: As unnecessary as making a sequel to Twister and at least as gloriously obvious as titling it Twisters. In recent years, the distortion pedal has been cause for concern in country music, not because it’s a sign of inauthenticity or any of that guff but because Nashville wields it like a dumb man with an oversized truck: as an easy marker of lunkish masculinity that’s never actually used to get anything from A to B — wit, wordplay, weltanschauung. “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma” sounds like that type of thing, but Luke Combs matches the storm-sized riff with roaring intensity. The lyrics about chasing the devil down a Sooner State highway don’t get deep or dark enough to suggest any actual hell is being raised, but this is a song off the soundtrack of a summer blockbuster; it’s enough to kick moderate quantities of ass.
[7]